Spring Thing is an annual festival celebrating new text-based computer games of all kinds. Originally founded as an off-season counterweight to IF Comp in the fall, the current incarnation of the Thing is a less competitive space with looser restrictions. Without the two-hour judging limit of IF Comp, for instance, longer games are welcomed (though shorter games are fine, too!) There’s no fee to enter, but you do have to submit an “intent to enter” in advance. And there are prizes!
Games must be debuts and in a well-polished state (bug tested, etc.)
You must submit an intent to enter by March 1st, 2025, and your game itself by March 30th.
Your game must be free to play, and will be archived on the Spring Thing site after the festival closes, although:
You can submit to the “Back Garden” to showcase a demo of a game you’re planning to sell, or a polished excerpt of something unfinished, or a game that cannot be archived.
You can submit revisions of previously released games to the “New Game Plus” section. Revisions need to be substantial, such as porting a game to a dramatically different system or adding substantial new graphics or new content.
Entrants to the Main Festival can be nominated for one of two “Best In Show” ribbons, and all entries are eligible for custom “Audience Awards.” Prize donors also gift fun, unique prizes , which Main Festival entrants have a chance to receive.
The festival is always looking for prize donors . If you have a cool idea for a prize that fellow IF authors might enjoy, let me know!
Check out the site for more info, and I’m happy to answer any questions here or sent to brian at springthing.net . Thanks, and happy writing,
Just a bit of feedback about the festival website: the “submit” page really buries the lede on where to go to actually submit your intent. I eventually found it, but sticking it in the middle of a paragraph doesn’t make it easy to find.
Anyway, I’m in, and we’ll see whether I can actually finish in time or not!
I’m glad you’ve joined! Daniel’s right, the previous organizer did it on purpose to reduce spam, but I’m not sure if it’s needed anymore; maybe next year I’ll try making it more obvious!
After discussion with entrants, I’ve decided this year to allow more than 1 entry per person in the back garden area, with a total limit or 3 per person.
The total of all submissions needs to still be under 100 MB. This new rule is meant to be for a small set of related games, but could also apply to some larger games.
If anyone wanted to submit different games to different parts of the competition, there could still be at most 1 in the main entry or the new game plus entry, and all other entries would need to be in the back garden.
There is still a limit of 1 game per entrant in the New Game Plus section as it would be very tempting for an author to promote their whole back catalog by doing some cosmetic upgrades to their games and dumping them all in the Spring Thing at once.
Hooray! This year, I promise to finish my game starting with “O” so I get the whole alphabet. It’s … experimental, and an unexpected sequel to something else I wrote. But I can at least have it well tested.
I like allowing >1 entry in the back garden too. Hopefully nobody will just dump stuff there but I think it will be great as someone will probably have 2 odd entries they can’t decide between & ST will be better for having both.
If you want to get around this rule, you could submit an “anthology” collecting several shorter works (providing each is complete and tested), or if you really want to get around it you could submit under an alias.
I’m not saying I’m planning to try that, but do the rules already officially allow you to submit more entries under a different identity?
